The child does not speak.
Perhaps there is some dark part of him that prefers the silence. Because he does not have to pretend to feel anything that he does not. The voice had been soft once. Kind. He had been kind. Nothing at all like what it is now, so flat and unaffected that even he can hear it. But it has precious little to do with the heart, useless and frozen, in his chest because all of the warmth had been drained from him long before Anaxarete had taken his pain away.
Even before he had gone to the Mountain alive and come back something else entirely.
The child does not speak and he does not either.
She reaches for him and he does not recoil. He lets her touch him, just barely. And he feels her touch him, but there is no warmth. He remembers, without any feeling, being touched for the first time after the Mountain took his life. How she’d murmured something about sadness, how it leaked out of him. He wonders if the child can taste his sadness, too, even if he no longer feels it. Does it still live in his skin? Will he ever really be rid of it?
He lets her touch him and he feels it.
The ghost of a feeling.
Some long forgotten thing. How strange it is to feel a distant stirring in his chest and know that it does not belong to him. There, for the first time in years, a flicker of warmth. And when he draws away, the feeling stays with her. He cannot take it with him.
He aches to draw a breath, but he does not. The lungs have begun to atrophy. He couldn’t even if he tried. So, he merely blinks at her. Tilts his head and searches her face.
“Such powerful magic for someone so young,” he muses. “What else can you show me?”
@[Aela]